paleontology

THE CITY IN HISTORY

Lewis Mumford / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961

“Mid the wanderings of Paleolithic man, the dead were the first to have a permanent dwelling: a cavern, a mound marked by a cairn, a collective barrow.”

“The city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one sense indeed, the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every city. Urban life spans the historic space between the earliest burial ground for dawn man and the final cemetery, the necropolis, in which one civilization after another, has met its end.”

______________________________

I’ve been sorting piles of books to find those that I can dispense with, at the same time reacquainting myself with those to which I return for inspiration and reference, and vitally, responsible for a handful of ideas that set me off on a journey many years ago toward understanding human behavior, which for this Asperger, is/was a critical topic. It is my hypothesis that Asperger types have a hyposocial, visually-based brain organization that “resembles” that of pre-agricultural Wild Homo sapiens.

The City in History, by Lewis Mumford, is one of those books. I have never read all 576 pages of its exhaustive details; the quote at top occurs near the beginning, and it struck me immediately with its importance to modern human destiny; not predestined destiny, but the path of human civilization as it has played out over the previous 10-15,000 years of humans becoming domesticated humans, a distinction that has become more obvious to me as I have explored this “thing” called Asperger’s.

Modern social destiny, and the “type” Homo sapiens sapiens who created it, continues to be further defined by adaptation to hypersocial modern environments. This social destiny was not a collective direction decided upon by “mankind” but the result of individuals pursuing survival. Climatic change and other natural geologic processes forced the dependence on agriculture and a sedentary life; the “idea” of controlling nature must have seemed to be a great and victorious reality at the time, one which could only be “good”. This quest for dominance over nature and its contents, remains the central self-important and disastrous goal for modern techno-social humans, but from this one step into domestication 10-15,000 years ago, a global environmental tragedy has followed.

Mumford’s book is filled with the grandiose “narrative” that archaeologists and anthropologists envy – frustrated novelists that they are. Historians are free to do this; history has always been a scheme of cultural focus, of mythology with few facts, or a deluge of facts, added to “support” the myth. Our mistake is in thinking that mythology is “false” and has no value, and that history must be “scientific” – which it is not. It is literature that serves to remind us of the hundreds of millions of lives that have been lived, and great writers like Mumford remind us of the delusional belief that we are a supreme and intelligent species that has fulfilled a supernatural evolutionary destiny, but instead, our behavior shows us to be one more repetition of the necropolis stage of civilization.

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Q&A with a Dinosaur Hunter: How Jack Horner Changed Paleontology

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | May 23, 2016

LiveScience

Paleontologist Jack Horner found his first dinosaur at age 8, and he hasn’t stopped “digging” since. Despite his dyslexia and never having graduated from college, Horner changed the way researchers study dinosaurs, and is now a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and a curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.

Growing up with dyslexia

Live Science: When did you start getting interested in dinosaurs?

Horner:I’ve been interested in paleontology my whole life. I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 8, and I found my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13.

Live Science: How did you find a dinosaur bone when you were 8 years old?

Horner: My father had remembered seeing some big bones when he was young out on a ranch that he owned in Montana. He took me out there when I was interested, and I wandered around until I found one.

Horner: Growing up was just terrible, because everybody thinks you’re stupid and lazy. It’s funny that they didn’t understand that a long time ago. And they still don’t. There’s still a disconnect between kids who have learning problems and people understanding them.

One of the things that I’ll be working on is with the chancellor at Chapman University, in Orange, California. We’re going to see if we can figure out ways to better integrate kids with dyslexia schools into universities.

Live Science: I heard you flunked out of college seven times. But you kept going back?

Jack Horner:I wanted to be a paleontologist, and there were lots of courses in paleontology at the University of Montana, where I was going to school. And so I just kept on taking them. But I read at a low third-grade level, so there wasn’t any possible way that I could pass the test.

Live Science: That sounds really difficult.

Horner: Yeah, it’s just impossible. A person with dyslexia is good at spatial things and putting big ideas together and making new ideas. But we’re not very good at anything that schools have designed to test people.

I went to college for seven years and I flunked out seven times. When I thought I was finished, I started applying for jobs. I basically looked at all of the English-speaking museums in the country and other parts of the world. I got three job offers, and I took a museum technician job at Princeton University just because it was the smallest town. [7 Science Museums to Visit This Summer]

Live Science: So you didn’t get a degree?

Horner: No, I do not have a degree of any kind. I got two honorary doctorates, but I do not have a normal degree — not a bachelor’s, a master’s or a Ph.D.

I went to Princeton as a preparator [a person who prepares, installs and maintains museum exhibits] in 1975 and discovered the baby dinosaurs in Montana in 1978. So, three years later, I published my first paper in the journal Nature.

Live Science: Was it challenging to write a research paper with dyslexia?

Horner: I had written a lot of papers while I was in school, and I did really poorly. But one of my teachers told me, “As long as the science was good, somebody would always help me with it.” I found that was true. When I submitted my paper to Nature, it was not very pretty, but on the other hand, the science was really good.

The editors there helped me out, and I had some people at Princeton who helped as well, before I even got it submitted.

When I published that paper, Princeton promoted me to research scientist. I couldn’t have students, but I was able to write grants, and so I wrote a couple of NSF [National Science Foundation] grants that I got. A couple of years later, Montana State University was looking for a curator, and since I was at that level, I got that job in 1982.

But since I didn’t have a Ph.D., they wouldn’t let me have students, they wouldn’t let me teach classes. But four years later, they did.

Live Science: Why did they change their minds?

Horner: I got a MacArthur Fellowship. After that they let me be a professor and teach classes and have graduate students, including Ph.D. students.

Live Science: You famously found evidence in 1978 that dinosaurs were social animals that cared for their young. What was the evidence?

Horner: That was the first discovery. They were 15 baby dinosaurs in a nest and they were twice as big as they would have been when they hatched. So, they stayed in their nests while they at least doubled in size.

We find nesting grounds all over the world now and the nests are close together, so it suggests they were colonial nesters.

We also find lots of evidence that they traveled in herds, because we find these massive, monolithic dung beds.

[Horner has also found that baby dinosaurs look different from adult dinosaurs, a view contrary to that held by some other scientists who say that these specimens are a different species altogether. For instance, there is debate over whether Nanotyrannus is a unique species or simply a young Tyrannosaurus rex.] [In Photos: Montana’s Dueling Dinosaur Fossils]

Live Science: You’re also pretty hands-on with fossils, cutting them apart sometimes. Was that a new technique at the time?

Horner: People have been looking at the internal structure of dinosaurs for a long time. But basically they would ask a museum for extra dinosaur parts, like broken pieces. And so, they weren’t getting very good samples.

I realized that most of the information about the growth of the dinosaurs was on the insides of their bones. Starting in the 1980s, we began to disassemble the bones, and take a mold and cast of them. Then you still have the original morphology — you can still study the body.

But then you can take the piece you took out and cut it, slice it up, and you have the entire circumference [to look at the dinosaur’s growth rings, which look like a tree’s rings]. That’s how we now determine the age of dinosaurs, their rate of growth and their physiology.

We started doing that with leg bones, and now we can do it with skulls. For a long time, people thought it was destructive paleontology. But it’s not destructive if you mold it, and cast it, and put a cast back in so that the morphology is still there.

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Fossil footprints challenge established theories of human evolution

August 31, 2017 / Uppsala University

Summary: Newly discovered human-like footprints from Crete may put the established narrative of early human evolution to the test. The footprints are approximately 5.7 million years old and were made at a time when previous research puts our ancestors in Africa — with ape-like feet.

Ever since the discovery of fossils of Australopithecus in South and East Africa during the middle years of the 20th century, the origin of the human lineage has been thought to lie in Africa. More recent fossil discoveries in the same region, including the iconic 3.7 million year old Laetoli footprints from Tanzania which show human-like feet and upright locomotion, have cemented the idea that hominins (early members of the human lineage) not only originated in Africa but remained isolated there for several million years before dispersing to Europe and Asia. The discovery of approximately 5.7 million year old human-like footprints from Crete, published online this week by an international team of researchers, overthrows this simple picture and suggests a more complex reality.

Human feet have a very distinctive shape, different from all other land animals. The combination of a long sole, five short forward-pointing toes without claws, and a hallux (“big toe”) that is larger than the other toes, is unique. The feet of our closest relatives, the great apes, look more like a human hand with a thumb-like hallux that sticks out to the side. The Laetoli footprints, thought to have been made by Australopithecus, are quite similar to those of modern humans except that the heel is narrower and the sole lacks a proper arch. By contrast, the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia, the oldest hominin known from reasonably complete fossils, has an ape-like foot. The researchers who described Ardipithecus argued that it is a direct ancestor of later hominins, implying that a human-like foot had not yet evolved at that time.

The new footprints, from Trachilos in western Crete, have an unmistakably human-like form. This is especially true of the toes. The big toe is similar to our own in shape, size and position; it is also associated with a distinct ‘ball’ on the sole, which is never present in apes. The sole of the foot is proportionately shorter than in the Laetoli prints, but it has the same general form. In short, the shape of the Trachilos prints indicates unambiguously that they belong to an early hominin, somewhat more primitive than the Laetoli trackmaker. They were made on a sandy seashore, possibly a small river delta, whereas the Laetoli tracks were made in volcanic ash.

‘What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,’ says Professor Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University, last author of the study.

At approximately 5.7 million years, they are younger than the oldest known fossil hominin, Sahelanthropus from Chad, and contemporary with Orrorin from Kenya, but more than a million years older than Ardipithecus ramidus with its ape-like feet. This conflicts with the hypothesis that Ardipithecus is a direct ancestor of later hominins. Furthermore, until this year, all fossil hominins older than 1.8 million years (the age of early Homo fossils from Georgia) came from Africa, leading most researchers to conclude that this was where the group evolved. However, the Trachilos footprints are securely dated using a combination of foraminifera (marine microfossils) from over- and underlying beds, plus the fact that they lie just below a very distinctive sedimentary rock formed when the Mediterranean sea briefly dried out, 5.6 millon years ago. By curious coincidence, earlier this year, another group of researchers reinterpreted the fragmentary 7.2 million year old primate Graecopithecus from Greece and Bulgaria as a hominin. Graecopithecus is only known from teeth and jaws.

During the time when the Trachilos footprints were made, a period known as the late Miocene, the Sahara Desert did not exist; savannah-like environments extended from North Africa up around the eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, Crete had not yet detached from the Greek mainland. It is thus not difficult to see how early hominins could have ranged across south-east Europe and well as Africa, and left their footprints on a Mediterranean shore that would one day form part of the island of Crete.

‘This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate. Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen,’ says Per Ahlberg.

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Study reveals why our ancestors switched to bipedal power

Oh no it doesn’t! The study reveals that modern chimpanzees behave in pre-conceived ways, in a contrived setting, in which food and its availability is controlled by humans. Nothing about how / why our ancestors became bipedal can be concluded from this study.

(FROM: PhysOrg.com) _ Our earliest ancestors may have started walking on two limbs instead of four in a bid to monopolise resources and to carry as much food as possible in one go, researchers have found. A study published in the journal Current Biology this week, investigated the behaviour of modern-day chimpanzees as they competed for food resources, in an effort to understand why our hominin, or human-like ancestors became bipedal.

Objections:

1. Chimpanzees are not Bipedal; Birds, and their particular Dinosaur ancestors, are bipedal. Choosing Chimpanzees is Lazy; why not study other bipedal species?

2. Chimpanzees are not our Ancestors, and yet we insist on using them as analogs for study comparisons.

3. Our ancestors did not “Start Walking on Two limbs” one day because they “realized” that it would Make them more competitive.

4. The vast majority of species are not bipedal, and yet all have strategies for acquiring food resources.

5. One must then ask, Why didn’t chimpanzees become bipedal if doing so presented such an advantage?

Are chimpanzees the best animal to study for information about bipedal evolution? Anthropology seems “hung up” on a fascination with chimpanzees,as if chimps are human children who didn’t grow up, but if they had, would be just like us.

The joint University of Cambridge and Kyoto University team of biological anthropologists, led by PhD student Susana Carvalho and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, conclude that our earliest hominin ancestors may have lived in shifting environmental conditions in which certain resources were not always easy to come by. (Wow! Brilliant!)Over time, intense bursts of bipedal activity may have led to anatomical changes(OMG! The “Just So” version of how evolution works) that in turn became the subject of natural selection where competition for food or other resources was strong. (Amazing how evolutionary processes are “skipped over” by the meaningless weasel words “led to” – neurotypical speak for “the magic parthappened here”!)

Storytelling is a widespread human attribute, but it is not reliable science.

Professor William McGrew, from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, said: Bipedality as the key human adaptation may be an evolutionary product of this strategy persisting over time. (What strategy? Running on two legs now and then in order to force “evolution” to drastically alter anatomy? And then convincing one’s offspring to do the same – generation after generation until “the magic” happens?)Ultimately, it set our ancestors on a separate evolutionary path.

Lack of evidence in the fossil record(there is no evidence for our conclusions, which means we can pursue lavish speculation) means that researchers remain divided over when these ancestors became bipedal. It is widely believed that they did so because of climatic changes, which reduced forested areas and forced them to move longer distances across open terrain more often.(Invoke long-term nebulous environmental conditions as a last resort)

More storytelling.

The new research digs deeper, however, by attempting to explain what particular pressures within that context forced those hominins to modify their posture and resort to moving on their legs. (Bipedalism is an act of desperation?) Two surveys were carried out. The first was in Kyoto University’s “outdoor laboratory” (Outdoor does not mean wild, or that these are wild chimps uncontaminated by human interference) of a natural clearing in Bossou Forest, Guinea. Here, the researchers allowed the chimpanzees access to different combinations of two different types of nut – the oil palm nut, which is naturally widely available, and the coula nut, which is not, so the latter is an “unpredictable” resource. (Unpredictable meaning controlled by the humans doing the “study”. (Do Chimpanzees think in these conscious human terms?)

Their behavior was monitored in three different situations: (a) when only oil palm nuts were available, (b) when a small number of coula nuts was available, and (c) when coula nuts were the majority available resource.

When the rare coula nuts were available only in small numbers, the chimpanzees transported far more in one go. Similarly, when coula nuts were the majority resource, the chimpanzees ignored the oil palm nuts altogether. Clearly, the chimpanzees regarded the coula nuts as a more highly-prized resource and competed for them more intensely. (This is a human economic word-concept being projected onto an animal that may simply prefer the taste, or other physical attributes of the coula nut, or appreciates novelty in a boring diet).

In such high-competition settings, (manipulated by humans)the frequency of cases in which the chimpanzees started moving on two legs increased by a factor of four. (And this “two-leg frequency” is attributable solely to the “coula conspiracy”. No other stimulus to “two-legged” behavior occurred – or was it all behavior simply “recorded” as fitting the expectations of the study?) Not only was it obvious that bipedal movement allowed them to carry more of this precious resource (brilliant observation),but also that they were actively trying to move as much as they could in one go by using everything available, even their mouths. (This does not add to “bipedal” advantage; mouths are available when walking on all four feet)

Would any of this stand up in a court of “evolutionary law” as evidence for anatomical change by “choice or force”? No. This argument is compatible with Creationism!

Many species “hoard” food stuffs as they become available – in fact, it’s a prime behavior in Nature.

The second survey was a 14-month study of Bossou chimpanzees crop-raiding, a situation in which they have to compete for rare and unpredictable resources. Here, 35% of their activity involved some sort of bipedal movement, and once again, this behavior appeared to belinked to a clear attempt to carry as much as possible in one go. The study concludes that unpredictable resources, like the coula nut in the field survey, are seen by as more valuable. When these resources are scarce and access to them is on a first-come, first-served basis, (chimps have no “social” status structure for determining access to resources?)they are more prone to switch to bipedal movement, because it allows them to carry more of the resource at once. (Conflating details from two separate “surveys” in order to increase the importance of each one is not scientifically valid. Each must stand on its own. Note abundant and vague “weasel words”)

Isn’t this activity simply an example of chimpanzees (and many, many species across the animal spectrum) taking advantage of an opportunity? It has no direct connection or explanatory value concerning bipedalism. We identify chimps as “cute little humans.”

Here we go again!

Totally unsupported conclusions:

For our early ancestors, unpredictable access to vital resources may have been a frequent occurrence because of climatic shifts and rapid environmental change. Those who resorted to bipedal movement may have had an advantage, and gradually, anatomical change may have taken place as they used this strategy again and again.Once that happened, ability to move more easily on two legs may have become a selection pressure, so that over many generations, it became the norm.

Of course! This is how the giraffe got its long neck; by stretching and stretching to reach leaves higher and higher on the tree until one giraffe’s neck got “stuck” being longer andmagically, ALL GIRAFFES got this “long neck” because the stretching somehow “became permanent” in their DNA.

Wow! Giraffes certainly didn’t think ahead to the unintended consequences of “stretching their necks”, did they? And couldn’t our ancestors have known how much back and joint pain their bipedal behavior would cause?

I can’t believe the magical thinking at work (and I’m being charitable) in this type of academic biological anthropology study! Drastic anatomical changes in early apes is attributed (retroactively) to behavior in modern captive chimpanzees, in situations contrived to confirm pre-conceived results, which attribute “conscious modern thinking” to “mysterious ancestral apes”.

What’s missing from so much scientific activity today is CONCRETE THINKING.

More information: The full report, Chimpanzee carrying behavior and the origins of human bipedality, is available in the March 20 issue of Current Biology: www.cell.com/current-biology/

Remains of various extinct elephants were known by Europeans for centuries, but were generally interpreted, based on biblical accounts, as the remains of legendary creatures such as behemoths or giants. It was also theorised that they were remains of modern elephants that had been brought to Europe during the Roman Republic, for example the war elephants of Hannibal and Pyrrhus of Epirus, or animals that had wandered north. The first woolly mammoth remains studied by European scientists were examined by Hans Sloane in 1728 and consisted of fossilised teeth and tusks from Siberia. Sloane was the first to recognise that the remains belonged to elephants.

Sloane turned to another biblical explanation for the presence of elephants in the Arctic, asserting that they had been buried during the Great Flood, and that Siberia had previously been tropical prior to a drastic climate change. Others interpreted Sloane’s conclusion slightly differently, arguing the flood had carried elephants from the Tropics to the Arctic. Sloane’s paper was based on travellers’ descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia and Britain. He discussed the question of whether or not the remains were from elephants, but drew no conclusions. In 1738, the German zoologist Johann Philipp Breyne argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant. He could not explain why a tropical animal would be found in such a cold area as Siberia, and suggested that they might have been transported there by the Great Flood. In 1796, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier was the first to identify the woolly mammoth remains not as modern elephants transported to the Arctic, but as an entirely new species. He argued this species had gone extinct and no longer existed, a concept that was not widely accepted at the time.

When excavated, this mammoth was almost intact and retained skin, muscles, and innards. It was found in 1900 at the Berezovka River, a tributary of the Kolyma.
see also: http://www.donsmaps.com/bcmammoth.html

Mummified Steppe Bison from 43,000 ya during a warm period, Kenai Peninsula. Displayed at University of Alaska Museum of the North

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The Field Museum of Natural History was a “kid magnet” in my day; I’m sure it still is. I remember the Egyptian mummies, which I didn’t like to be around because the odor they gave off was repulsive. The big dioramas and paintings attracted me, especially the giant fauna of Ice Age animals, which were labeled “extinct”. Some were shown as being hunted by Paleo-Indians; it seemed preposterous (and terribly brave – or an act of desperation) for a human with a wooden spear and stone point to do such a thing. Then there were “cave” animals presented; they looked a lot like contemporary bears and big cats, but bigger and more ferocious. The word “cave” confused me. Being Asperger I took this literally: humans occupied caves, too – did they have to “evict” or kill all the animals living there before moving in? I’m still not sure, but it seems that “cave” doesn’t refer to the animal occupying the cave, but to species that humans depicted in cave paintings. (Language again! So non-specific…)

As a “real” hunting scene, this is idiotic! Wild boar are EXTREMELY dangerous animals! No one would crouch on the ground or stand a few feet in front of one of these fast charging and deadly animals… And what about those “coyote-looking” dogs on leashes? Hmmm… And all that tender white skin?

Diorama ID: Mas d’Azil cave in France. The scene shows two Azilian men armed with wooden spears with flint lance-points at close quarters with an enraged wild boar defending his mate and two young pigs. The dogs are held by rawhide straps and they are straining forward at the leash. The painted background shows the peaks of the Pyrenees in the distance.

Le Mas-d’Azil cave, southwestern France, is the typesite for the prehistoric Azilian culture. The Grotte du Mas d’Azil is a “supersite” for human habitation ca. 30,000 years ago, and is also a key site for the Magdalenian culture that preceded it.

Ecological Change, Range Fluctuations and Population Dynamics during the Pleistocene

Apart from the current human-induced climate change, the Holocene is notable for its stable climate. In contrast, the preceding age, the Pleistocene, was a time of intensive climatic fluctuations, with temperature changes of up to 15°C occurring within a few decades. These climatic changes have substantially influenced both animal and plant populations. Until recently, the prevailing opinion about the effect of these climatic fluctuations on species in Europe was that populations survived glacial maxima in southern refugia and that populations died out outside these refugia. However, some of the latest studies of modern population genetics, the fossil record and especially ancient DNA reveal a more complex picture. There is now strong evidence for additional local northern refugia for a large number of species, including both plants and animals. Furthermore, population genetic analyses using ancient DNA have shown that genetic diversity and its geographical structure changed more often and in more unpredictable ways during the Pleistocene than had been inferred. Taken together, the Pleistocene is now seen as an extremely dynamic era, with rapid and large climatic fluctuations and correspondingly variable ecology. These changes were accompanied by similarly fast and sometimes dramatic changes in population size and extensive gene flow mediated by population movements. Thus, the Pleistocene is an excellent model case for the effects of rapid climate change, as we experience at the moment, on the ecology of plants and animals.

Excerpt: Clearly, these massive climatic and environmental changes significantly influenced the distribution and genetic diversity of plants and animals. The idea that, during times of adverse climate, species track their habitat goes back to Darwin [9], and the Pleistocene should represent an excellent opportunity to test this assumption. Generally, one would assume that Arctic species would expand their distribution southwards during colder times and that temperate species would expand northwards during warmer times. While this is straightforward in North America, with mountain chains, which represent partial barriers to range shifts, running from north to south, in Europe a level of complexity is added with mountain chains running from east to west and the available land mass becoming smaller to the south and being divided into several peninsulas bordering the Mediterranean. This geography, together with numerous studies that found geographical patterns in the genetic diversity of many species consistent with colonization of mid-latitude and northern Europe from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and the Balkans (for review, see [10,11]) has resulted in the classical ‘refugium theory’, which proposes that temperate species survived the glacial maxima in southern refugia with little gene flow among them and colonized the more northern parts from there during interglacial times. While this model is theoretically sound and correct in many aspects, recent studies on both modern and, especially, ancient DNA diversity have shown that reality is much more complex and only very broadly follows a contraction–expansion model for population dynamics, with many additional processes complicating the picture [12–16].

Finally, the end of the Pleistocene is marked by a massive extinction of large land vertebrates across most of the world (Box 1), with the exception of Africa [17]. Although these extinctions have long been known, their causes remain controversial. While some authors blame humans [18], others deny any human influence, at least on the continents, although human-induced extinctions are widely accepted for islands [19]. Again, recent research has revealed a great deal about the timing and processes of these extinctions, showing that not only mammoths [20,21], but also giant deer (deceivingly known as Irish elk) [22] and some Caribbean ground sloths [23], survived into the Holocene. However, when it comes to the cause(s) of these extinctions, the verdict is still out.

Signature Pleistocene animals.

The Arctic fox (Alopex lagopus) is a small (smaller than the red fox) white or bluish-grey fox that lives today in the arctic northern hemisphere of the Holarctic from Greenland to Iceland and the Arctic regions of North America and Eurasia. During the Pleistocene it had a much wider distribution across the middle part of Europe and western Asia as well as in the large ice-free region of Beringia. It is primarily an inhabitant of the tundra and mountainous regions above the tree line, but it does penetrate into the taiga to some degree. Arctic foxes feed primarily on lemmings, but their diet also includes Arctic hare, eggs, and carrion scavenged from the leftovers of larger predators. A remarkable characteristic is their capability for long distance dispersal, with movements up to 2,000 km.

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) had and still has by far the largest habitat range of all living bear species. Formerly, its habitat extended across North Africa, Europe, the northern and middle parts of Asia and North America from Alaska down to Mexico. Due to intensive human persecution, it is now extinct in many of these areas, including North Africa, large parts of Europe and most of North America. Brown bears are very adaptable and can live on both a mostly herbivorous diet and a mostly carnivorous diet. They are very variable in size and other morphological traits which historically has led to the description of numerous subspecies and even species. Today, all brown bears are considered a single species with a number of subspecies.

Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) are the close — and less fortunate — cousins of the brown bear. The two species diverged some 1.6 million years ago, with tooth and stable isotope analyses indicating that cave bears were mostly herbivorous. However, recently a population was discovered that shows a stable isotope signature indicating an omnivorous, or even carnivorous, diet. Although in Europe cave bear remains are much more numerous than those of the brown bear, cave bears went extinct some 25,000 years ago. It has recently been shown that cave bears also occurred in Asia up to north-eastern Siberia.

Cave hyenas (Crocuta crocuta spelaea) are close relatives of the living spotted hyenas from Africa. In fact, in mitochondrial DNA sequence trees, sequences of cave and spotted hyenas are quite intermingled, questioning any taxonomic distinction of them as a subspecies or even as a species. Judging by cave paintings, they were probably spotted like modern spotted hyenas in Africa. They lived in Eurasia throughout the Pleistocene and probably already during the late Pliocene, about 3 million years ago. The timing of their extinction is not well established, but may have taken place around the same time as the cave bear, some 25,000 years ago.

The giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus), or Irish elk, is the gigantic relative of the rather gracile fallow deer. Giant deer are not only remarkable for their large body size but also for their huge antlers which could span up to 3.5 meters. Giant deer are often seen as typical representatives of the Pleistocene, but recent research has shown that in the Urals, giant deer survived until at least 7,700 years ago, far into the Holocene.

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) is no doubt the most iconic of all extinct Pleistocene animals. However, the woolly mammoth is only the last representative of a long lineage that had its origin in Africa. The first European mammoth lived in southern Europe and only later did mammoths colonize the arctic regions. Woolly mammoths differ from their closest relatives, the living elephants, in many features, most conspicuously by their curved tusks, the long hair and their small ears and short tails. Tens of thousands of mammoth bones have been recovered from the northern permafrost regions and sometimes even complete frozen carcasses. Mammoths survived into the Holocene, with the last population disappearing from Wrangel Island only about 3,700 years ago.

The steppe bison (Bison priscus) must have been a very common species throughout the Arctic region, especially in Beringia, given the vast numbers of fossils that have been found. Steppe bison were very variable in their morphology, especially with regard to the size of their horns, which were much larger in some individuals than in modern bison. They went extinct in Eurasia, but genetic analyses have established that they were the ancestor of the modern American bison, Bison bison. Their relationship to the European bison, Bison bonasus, is not known.

In this review, we will discuss the dynamics of animal and plant populations during the Pleistocene, trying to outline how populations reacted to the rapid variations in climate. We will restrict our analyses to the northern hemisphere, as the majority of studies on Pleistocene DNA have been done on species from this region.

What kids see today: Neoteny is rampant in American entertainment and education! Thank-you Hollywood for making “creationism” look legitimate!

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Yes, this is about dinosaurs, but the principle applies to the “every anthropologist who finds a fossil gets to name a new species” problem in Homo evolution, based on “skull” shape and dimensions rather than on “reproduction” as the evolutionary sign of speciation. Here, it’s developmental changes that have to be sorted out. Two articles:

New analyses of dinosaur growth may wipe out one-third of species

(PhysOrg.com) — Paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Museum of the Rockies have wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur, one of them named three years ago – with great fanfare – after Hogwarts, the school attended by Harry Potter.

Their demise comes after a three-horned dinosaur, Torosaurus, was assigned to the dustbin of history last month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in the United Kingdom, the loss in recent years of quite a few duck-billed hadrosaurs and the probable disappearance of Nanotyrannus, a supposedly miniature Tyrannosaurus rex.

These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study.

The confusion is traced to their bizarre head ornaments, ranging from shields and domes to horns and spikes, which changed dramatically with age and sexual maturity, making the heads of youngsters look very different from those of adults.

“Juveniles and adults of these dinosaurs look very, very different from adults, and literally may resemble a different species,” said dinosaur expert Mark B. Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. “But some scientists are confusing morphological differences at different growth stages with characteristics that are taxonomically important. The result is an inflated number of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.”

Goodwin and John “Jack” Horner of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman, are the authors of a new paper analyzing North American dome-headed dinosaurs that appeared this week in the public access online journal PLoS One.

Unlike the original dinosaur die-off at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, this loss of species is the result of a sustained effort by paleontologists to collect a full range of dinosaur fossils – not just the big ones. Their work has provided dinosaur specimens of various ages, allowing computed tomography (CT) scans and tissue study of the growth stages of dinosaurs.

In fact, Horner suggests that one-third of all named dinosaur species may never have existed, but are merely different stages in the growth of other known dinosaurs.

“What we are seeing in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana suggests that we may be overextended by a third,” Horner said, a “wild guess” that may hold true for the various horned dinosaurs recently discovered in Asia from the Cretaceous. “A lot of the dinosaurs that have been named recently fall into that category.”

The new paper, published online Oct. 27, contains a thorough analysis of three of the four named dome-headed dinosaurs from North America, including Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, the first “thick-headed” dinosaur discovered. After that dinosaur’s description in 1943, many speculated that male pachycephalosaurs used their bowling ball-like domes to head-butt one another like big-horn sheep, though Goodwin and Horner disproved that notion in 2004 after a thorough study of the tissue structure of the dome.

Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.

“Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth,” Horner said, “which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”

These head ornaments, which probably had horny coverings of keratin that may have been brightly-colored as they are in many birds, started growing when these dinosaurs reached about half their adult size, and were remodeled as these dinosaurs matured, continuing to change shape even into adulthood and old age, according to the researchers.

In the new paper, Horner and Goodwin compared the bone structures of Pachycephalosaurus with that of a domeheaded dinosaur, Stygimoloch spinifer, discovered in Montana by UC Berkeley paleontologists in 1973, and a dragon-like skull discovered in South Dakota and named in 2006 as a new species, Dracorex hogwartsia.

With the help of CT scans and microscopic analysis of slices through the bones of Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch, the team concluded that Stygimoloch, with its high, narrow dome, growing tissue and unfused skull bones, was probably a pachycephalosaur subadult, in a stage just before sexual maturity.

Dracorex is one of a kind, and thus unavailable for dissection, but morphological analysis indicates it is a juvenile that hasn’t yet formed a dome, although the top of its skull shows thickening suggestive of an emerging dome.

“Dracorex’s flat skull, nodules on the front end and small spikes on back, and thickened but undomed frontoparietal bone all confirm that, ontogenetically, it is a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus,” Goodwin said.

Comparison of these skulls to other fossils in the hands of private collectors confirm the conclusions, they said. In all, they looked at 21 dome-headed dinosaur skulls and cranial elements from North America.

The key to this analysis, Horner said, was years of field work in Montana by his team and Goodwin’s in search of fossils of all sizes.

“We have gone out in the Hell Creek Formation for 11 years doing nothing but collecting absolutely everything we could find, which is the kind of collecting that is required,” he said. “If you think about Triceratops, people had collected for 100 years and still hadn’t found any juveniles. And we went out and spent 11 years collecting everything, and we found all kinds of them.”

“Early paleontologists recognized the distinction between adults and juveniles, but people have lost track of looking at ontogeny – how the individual develops – when they discover a new fossil,” Goodwin said. “Dinosaurs are not mammals, and they don’t grow like mammals.”

In fact, the so-called metaplastic bone on the heads of horned dinosaurs grows and dissolves, or resorbs, throughout life like no other bone, Horner said, and is reminiscent of the growth and loss of horns today in elk and deer. In earlier studies, Horner and Goodwin found dramatic remodeling of metaplastic bone in Triceratops, which led to their subsequent focus on dome-headed dinosaurs.

“Metaplastic bones get long and shorten, as in Triceratops, where the horn orientation is backwards in juveniles and forward in adults,” Horner said. Even in older specimens, such as the fossil previously named Torosaurus, bone in the face shield resorbs to create holes along the margin. John Scannella, Horner’s student at Montana State, presented a paper reclassifying Torosaurus as an old Triceratops at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Bristol, U.K., on Sept. 25.

“In order for that huge amount of bone to move, there has to be a lot of deposition and resorption,” Horner said.

Horner and Goodwin continue to search for dinosaur fossils in the Hell Creek Formation, which is rich in Triceratops, dome-headed dinosaurs, hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs. Analysis of growth stages in these taxa will have implications for other horned dinosaurs that are being uncovered in Asia and elsewhere.

“There are other horned dinosaurs I think may be over split,” that is, split into too many new species rather than being lumped together as one species, Goodwin said.

No more Demons and Dragon Kings? Pachycephalosaurus ontogeny

CLIP: On top of all that, some dinosaurs also appear to develop unique structures like horns, domes and crests at various points during their development, and many are quite dramatic, appearing very quickly during ontogeny. No wonder then that it was not uncommon for scientists to name several species of dinosaur found at the same time and same place differentiated largely by size and display structures. And possibly the best example of this situation was Pachycephalosaurus, Stygimoloch (“Styx demon”) and Dracorex (“dragon king”); found at the same time, in the same place, more closely related to each other than to other pachycephalosaurs, and differing only in size and cranial features. And then Dr. Jack Horner changed everything.

One of the most influential discoveries that has radically changed our understanding of dinosaurs and their world is the realization that dinosaurs often went through dramatic physical changes as they aged. It has been well known for some time that unlike modern birds, non-avian dinosaurs took several years to reach adult size and began breeding before reaching skeletal maturity, but shared with them very rapid growth rates, resulting in animals that ‘lived fast and died young’. Thanks to this growth habit, most dinosaurs that we have a significant sample size for show a particular pattern when it comes to their fossil record: hatchling and juveniles tend to be rare due to very high mortality rates (many were eaten and digested, resulting in no preservation), rapid growth rates to larger size and preservation bias that favors fossilization of large bodied, large boned animals. By comparison, there tends to be a large number of individuals that are one-half to two-thirds maximum adult size that represent animals that have reached sexual (but not skeletal) maturity, and a small number of individuals that have reached maximum adult size and skeletal maturity.

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A simple review of the “story” of “encephalized bipedal apes” as paleontologists see it.

Paleontology is not to be confused with anthropology: Paleontology is traditionally divided into various subdisciplines: Micropaleontology: Study of generally microscopic fossils, regardless of the group to which they belong. Paleobotany: Study of fossil plants; traditionally includes the study of fossil algae and fungi in addition to land plants. Palynology: Study of pollen and spores, both living and fossil, produced by land plants and protists. Invertebrate Paleontology: Study of invertebrate animal fossils, such as mollusks, echinoderms, and others. Vertebrate Paleontology: Study of vertebrate fossils, from primitive fishes to mammals. Human Paleontology (Paleoanthropology): The study of prehistoric human and proto-human fossils. Taphonomy: Study of the processes of decay, preservation, and the formation of fossils in general. Ichnology: Study of fossil tracks, trails, and footprints. Paleoecology: Study of the ecology and climate of the past, as revealed both by fossils and by other methods.

In short, paleontology is the study of what fossils tell us about the ecologies of the past, about evolution, and about our place, as humans, in the world. Paleontology incorporates knowledge from biology, geology, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, and even computer science to understand the processes that have led to the origination and eventual destruction of the different types of organisms since life arose.

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Fossil Focus: Encephalized bipedal apes

Humans would not have evolved if the ancestors of the African great apes had not. The ape fossil record begins 23 million years ago with the earliest putative apes, including Morotopithecus and Proconsul (Figure 1), from sites in East Africa, followed by many others throughout Africa, Europe and Asia. Although this record is fairly rich, it has done no better than DNA-based estimates at helping researchers to determine how living apes are related. Genetic studies estimate that gorillas split off from other apes about 9 million to 8 million years ago, and that the ancestors of bonobos and chimpanzees began evolving separately from the ancestors of humans 7 million to 6 million years ago.

Figure 1 – Right lateral (a) and front (b) views of the fossilized teeth and bones of the skull of the early ape Proconsul (museum catalogue no. KNM-RU 7290). Mary Leakey discovered this specimen, well-known for its remarkable preservation, on Rusinga Island, Kenya, in 1948. Images are not to scale with one another. Credit: Alan Walker.

Comparative anatomy, physiology, behaviour and genetics provide enough evidence for us to understand that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) than to any other species, and vice versa. But the fossil record of hominins (species more closely related to humans than to chimps) preserves snapshots of the how the evolutionary path of our lineage differs from theirs. Unfortunately, the fossil record of chimpanzee and bonobo evolution is small enough to fit into a coat pocket, but the fossil evidence for human evolution is far greater: there are hundreds of specimens, including many nearly complete skeletons and many well-preserved skulls. Although the hominin fossil record is dominated by durable teeth —which reveal diet, age of death, pace of growth and much more — here we will focus, briefly, on the tales of two other significant human traits that are well documented in the hominin lineage: our big brains and our bipedal bodies.

Of course, humans are not the only animals to have extremely large brains for their body sizes (to be highly encephalized).Witness the octopus and the squid — members of the cephalopod class — and, among mammals, the toothed whales, or odontocetes. The African great apes also have large brains, but humans, as the sole surviving hominin, are considered to be the most encephalized. Nor are humans the only animals to walk habitually on two legs. Birds and many of their extinct dinosaur relatives are just some of the many bipeds that have roamed, and continue to roam, Earth. But although many primates, especially the African great apes, frequently walk on their hind limbs — particularly when carrying objects, while moving about the trees and during bouts of threatening or playing — humans are the only ones to be dedicated to this mode of locomotion.

The first five million years or so of the hominin fossil record (from about 7 million to 2 million years ago) are dominated by the gradual appearance of bipedal characteristics in the skeleton. It was not until the last 2 million years — by which point most of the skeleton, apart from the cranium (or top part of the skull), resembled that of a modern human — that encephalization took off.

Compared with other apes — for example, gorillas (Figure 2), which climb and hang in trees and walk on all fours using their manual knuckles — the human skeleton’s anatomy reflects adaptations for upright walking and running. The human pelvis is modified so that the ilia (the blades) are bowl-shaped and curved around to the sides of the body, rearranging the muscles for balance during the single-support phase (i.e. when only one foot is on the ground) that dominates the time we spend walking. The spine is curved at the lumbar (lower back) and cervical (neck) regions, balancing our skeletons. Human legs are longer than our arms and long for our overall size compared to apes, helping to make us better travellers. Our hip joints are large and sturdy, because only two limbs bear our weight. Our knees are also large and reveal the angle of our femur (thigh bone), bringing the knee and the foot directly under our centre of gravity with every step. Our ankles and heels are rigid bony blocks, and the arches of our feet help to store and release energy with each stride. Our hallux (big toe) is not able to grasp like the thumb-like toe of many apes, but instead lines up with the other digits (all short toes) and plays a role in forcefully pushing off from the ground (‘toe-off’) at the end of each step during walking and running.

Figure 2 — Drawings of a human and gorilla skeleton. Humans did not evolve from the African great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos), but the anatomies of our common ancestors are thought to be more like those apes than like us. The further back we go in the hominin fossil record, the less human-like and the more ape-like they appear.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Primatenskelett-drawing.cjpg

The absolute best evidence for bipedal behaviour in the fossil record comes from footprints; they are direct impressions of that behaviour, requiring absolutely no inference from the shape of fossilized skeletons. And in Laetoli, Tanzania, there are wonderfully preserved 3.6-million-year-old tracks left by at least two bipedal hominins. They are not exactly like the prints that humans make today, but they lack an ape-like, divergent big toe and are not accompanied by any hand or knuckle prints.

At the time the tracks were laid down there is dental and bony fossil evidence in East Africa for Australopithecus afarensis. This is the species of the famous partial skeleton known as Lucy, discovered in the 1970s. Because A. afarensis skeletal morphology indicates that it walked upright, the Laetoli trackways are credited to the species. However, just whether A. afarensis walked upright all the time or only some of the time, and how much its bipedalism resembled modern human bipedalism, is still debated because A. afarensis did not have all the features that we associate with bipedalism in ourselves. This also goes for related australopiths discovered in South Africa, Australopithecus africanus and Australopithicus sediba. The australopith pelvis is not as bowl-shaped as ours; the legs are short and the arms relatively long; the toes are long and slightly curved; and the configuration of the tarsals, or foot bones, causes debate over whether the foot had an arch and whether australopiths tended to walk ‘pigeon-toed’. Making interpretation more difficult are new finds such as a foot from the site of Burtele in Ethiopia, which is near to and from around the same time as sites that produce A. afarensis fossils. The Burtele foot has some anatomy that suggests bipedalism, but also has an ape-like divergent hallux. It’s too much variation to include in a single species and, because of the hallux, cannot possibly belong to the hominins that left footprints at Laetoli. Despite these intriguing problems, it is clear that bipedalism, in whatever form it came, had hit its stride during Australopithecus times.

(Bones of Contention): For many palaeoanthropologists, the presence of bipedalism is the standard way to identify a hominin, meaning to decide that a fossil is a member of the human family tree, not another ape’s. This is the main reason that australopiths are labelled as hominins. But australopith species are known to have lived only from a little over 4 million years ago to roughly 2 million years ago, which does not go far enough back to match DNA-based estimates of when hominins diverged from chimps and bonobos, around 7 million to 6 million years ago. There are fossils older than the australopiths that look tantalizingly like hominins, but not completely. They belong to three genera: Sahelanthropus (from about 7 million years ago in Chad); Orrorin (from about 6 million years ago in Kenya); and Ardipithecus (from between 5.8 million and 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia). Tooth shape and indications that they walked on two legs mean that all three of these genera have been placed at the base of the hominin tree by some researchers. However, other researchers disagree, in large part because of debate about how these animals moved. Much more is known for Ardipithecus than the other two genera. As predicted for an early hominin, its skeleton has so many primitive and/or non-human-like features that it is not completely clear whether it was bipedal, and also whether it was an ancestor to australopiths (although its teeth suggest that it was).

For the foreseeable future, there will be debate about these early hominins and their behaviour: whether or not they walked on two feet regularly; they were doing so using a non-modern skeleton, so it is difficult to tell exactly how their movement worked. Bipedalism does not require a modern human skeleton, as shown by the Laetoli prints. However, the only way that researchers can work out how hominin fossils moved is to look at the observed anatomy and behaviour of the one surviving bipedal hominin species: modern humans. The traits that we associate with bipedalism in our own muscles and skeletons appeared slowly over the first 5 million years of hominin evolution, so those 5 million years are best described as showing a slow shift to habitual bipedalism.

There seems to have been an ecological shift to accompany the change in locomotion.Evidence, particularly from the chemistry of tooth enamel, suggests that australopiths were starting to eat lots of grasses and related plants, whereas other apes eat mostly fruits, leaves and nuts. This shift in dietary ecology supports the idea that the australopiths or their ancestors had moved out of the trees to look for food on the ground, consistent with a modified take on the ‘savannah hypothesis’ in which, during the Pliocene epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), hominins evolved under pressure to be able to find food in the relatively new grasslands of East and South Africa. Instead of terrestrial bipedalism originating with scavenging and hunting behaviours, as in the usual savannah hypothesis, perhaps it began with a mainly herbivorous phase.

Another traditional scenario, suggested by Charles Darwin, is that bipedalism arose to free the hands for making and using tools, carrying tools and food, and throwing objects while foraging or socializing. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, there are few tools preserved from 7 million to 2.5 million years ago. If we accept that Ardipithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus are early hominins, then we must say that bipedalism originated in wooded environments because that is how their environments have been reconstructed. The first hominins could have lived in trees as much or even more than extant great apes do now, and evolved bipedal locomotion there.

Since the latePliocene — when the hominin locomotor anatomy began to be familiarly human — hominin brains have tripled in size. Given that it is impossible to re-run evolution to find out whether our extreme encephalization could have evolved if we had not first become bipedal, we are all but forced (why? other highly encephalized species are not bipedal) to assume that bipedalism was a prerequisite.

There are three main hypotheses to explain hominin encephalization.The first is a technological scenario. Non-human primates that make and use tools have the largest brains and the most complex behaviours. Once the forelimbs are no longer necessary for locomotion, as in hapitually bipedal hominins, they can be used for more complex technology, more regularly, which in turn selects for further encephalization. This hypothesis is supported by the emergence of the first encephalized hominins — Homo habilis, the earliest members of our own genus — roughly coinciding with the earliest fairly regular appearance of crude stone tools, starting around 2.5 million years ago.These tools have been dubbed the Oldowan tradition, after Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where they were first discovered.

The second scenario to explain encephalization is ecological. Again, primates with complex ecological behaviours tend to have large brains. Once hominin bodies committed to bipedalism, they were suited for scavenging and hunting animal prey. Predicted consequences of this shift are borne out in the fossil record for Homo erectus, a hominin with half or more of the modern-human brain size, which emerged about 1.8 million years ago.The skeleton of H. erectus approaches modern proportions and the hominin’s anatomy seems to be built for short bursts of speed and long-distance travel. The diet included high-quality animal protein and fat for feeding a larger brain. H. erectus had a body size similar to that of modern humans (with lots of diversity), and it is the first hominin found outside Africa. Almost as soon as it originated in Africa, H. erectus dispersed across the continent and into Europe, central Asia and southeast Asia. (Why? Because it could, thanks to the changes above)

Much of the evidence for the ecological scenario is rooted in the discovery in the 1980s of a well-preserved H. erectus skeleton in Nariokotome in Kenya (Figure 3). It is not clear how large a role meat played in our ancestors’ diets, because the record is biased toward preserving bones of devoured prey over remains of devoured vegetation. However, there is no denying that an ecological shift occurred in the early Pleistocene, with H. erectus developing a more diverse diet and habitat and becoming more skilled at hunting. That shift must have included new requirements of the brain.There are hints at sites in Africa that H. erectus was able to control fire during the early Pleistocene, but the first reliable evidence of fire use does not appear until 800,000 years ago at a H. erectus site in Israel. Even then, there is no preserved evidence for regular fire use until around 400,000 years ago, when H. erectus was largely gone (or evolved into more modern) and more modern hominins existed. Scavenging, hunting, control and use of fire for cooking, living in diverse habitats in diverse climates and increasingly complex stone-tool manufacture require a larger, more complex brain. (These behaviors are possible due to a more complex brain)

Figure 3 — Nearly complete skeleton of the Nariokotome Boy (also known as Turkana Boy; museum catalogue no. KNM-WT 15000). This juvenile Homo erectus was discovered on the western side of Lake Turkana, Kenya, and dates to around 1.5 million to 1.6 million years ago. Credit: Alan Walker.

The third major hypothesis for encephalization is social.As hominins became skilled hunters and gatherers, they relied more and more on cooperative foraging behaviours, and being able to navigate social networks across time and space became increasingly adaptive behaviour. Once complex speech and language arrived, there would be new demands on the brain, not only for these behaviours, but also for the new cultural, cooperative environment that language created. Brain size, and especially the ratio of brain to body size, reached modern proportions by 500,000 years ago, with ‘archaic’ or early Homo sapiens, so social selective pressures would have contributed both to reaching modern brain sizes and to maintaining it through to the emergence of modern Homo sapiens – represented by skeletons dating to 195,000 years ago at Omo in Ethiopia.The same social conditions might have led to encephalization among Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, which lived roughly 300,000 to 30,000 years ago in Europe, the Middle East, and Eurasia.Neanderthal encephalization was comparable to ours and maybe slightly greater. There is an ongoing argument among researchers as to whether Neanderthals were a separate species, called Homo neanderthalensis, or a subspecies of Homo sapiens.

The technological, ecological and social pressures, requirements or demands could have worked both together and at different times throughout the Pleistocene epoch to the present and over many hominin generations. These evolutionary pressures would contribute to the more or less sustained reproductive success of hominins with slightly larger brains. And the fossil and archaeological records suggest that technology would have had the earliest effect, followed by the shift in ecology, and then sociality.These are some of the most mainstream hypotheses for encephalization and they implicitly or explicitly depend on bipedalism evolving before encephalization.

From bipedal ape to encephalized bipedal ape

We assume that some population of australopiths gave rise to the first members of the human genus, Homo.The earliest known Homo is australopith-like in anatomy but has a few differences, mainly its ever-so-slightly larger cranial capacity (a good proxy for brain size during life). Some researchers have argued that australopiths have marked encephalization, but others think that only early Homo had more encephalization than living apes. This debate will continue until more fossils are found that have indicators of both brain and body size for comparison. Until then, most researchers are comfortable beginning the brain-size story with Homo. It probably helps that the earliest stone tools on record and the earliest evidence for animal carcasses processed with those tools are found during the early Pleistocene, in early Homo times.

It is unclear when the hominin ecological shift to being stone-tool-making, meat-eating apes began. If the behaviour was common by H. erectus times, it should have started earlier. There is tantalizing evidence to suggest just this: the first known stone toolsare from Gona in Ethiopia at about 2.6 million years ago, when only australopiths are thought to have been present. At 2.5 million years ago, when there were still just australopiths present, there are bones marked with cuts made by stone tools at nearby Bouri in Ethiopia. A few years ago, another site in Dikika, Ethiopia, dated to 3.4 millionyears ago (during A. afarensis times), produced what appear to be bones marked by stone-tool cuts. If this evidence is interpreted correctly, it is consistent with the dawn of an ecological shift leading up to the more conspicuous evidence with Homo erectus.

Considering the evolution of these two major traits from an energetic standpoint, bipedalism may have been a prerequisite for encephalization. Bipedal locomotion appears to expend less energy than walking terrestrially as a great ape and that freed-up energy could have been reallocated to brain growth. And, of course, with greater technological, ecological and social intelligence aiding human foragers the resulting increase in food quality and quantity provided the energy for growing a large hominin brain. Pound for pound, brains are metabolically expensive so even something as seemingly straightforward as natural selection for a large intelligent brain must be a complex story.

Palaeoanthropologists continue to strive for better methods of understanding behaviour from bones and describing the anatomical, ecological and environmental contexts of the origins and evolution of bipedalism and encephalization. New fossil, archaeological and geological discoveries will be crucial for solving these puzzles in palaeoanthropology.